Dental patients wearing braces on their teeth have a difficult task when comes the time of thoroughly cleaning their teeth after each meal. Indeed, the brackets, wire and elastic bands constituting the braces create a plurality of small, difficult to reach cavities or channels where foodstuff particles may undesirably gather and come to clog same. Braces are worn on average for about two years, in view of mechanically correcting the relative arrangement of the teeth, according to standard orthodontic practice. Therefore, the accumulated foodstuff particles about the braces become a good breeding ground for bacteria resistant to the chemical agents of the saliva. Some of these bacteria may metabolically generate chemical by-products capable of attacking and structurally damaging the enamel of teeth, if they remain in constant contact therewith for a sufficiently long duration.
This of course is highly undesirable.
Conventional toothbrushes consist of an elongated tubular handle having at one end a "head" carrying a number of rows of nylon bristle tufts that transversely project from one face of the head. Such bristles are semi-flexible, in that they can--up to a certain point--clean various surfaces of the teeth when the latter are submitted to a scrubbing action with the toothbrush. However, because of the relatively substantial length of these bristles and of their orientation, they are only marginally effective for cleaning braces worn by the teeth. Therefore, some foodstuff particles will remain out of reach from the bristles of these prior art toothbrushes, and thus will remain stuck onto the braces, even after extended use of conventional toothbrushes, with possible damaging effect on the nearby teeth.